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THE WHITE DOG HOUSE — The annual revelation that a little black scottie dog runs the White House was again met with shock and anger by too few normal human beings.
“Barney,” aka “Bushmaster,” was again portrayed as merely the driving force behind the White House Christmas celebration by a cloying gaggle of the Bush family, gathered around the fireplace.

The disturbing video, produced by “Barney Productions,” was leaked to an eager lapdog press core that took turns slobbering over surreal segments of the Bushes, their children, and new in-law Henry Hager talking to Barney, the obsequious Miss Beasley, and a cat named “Willard,” amid poorly produced visions of grandeur of Barney winning several aquatic Olympic events.

Barney’s paper-thin veneer of social dogitude was apparently stretched to the breaking point recently when he attempted to violently amputate a few digits of Reuters reporter, Jon Decker.  This latest rupture of his genteel facade pales when compared to his attack on liberal Boston Celtics public relations director, Heather Walker on September 19th, 2008, who was savagely bitten on the wrist, elbows, knees, ear, nose, and throat, and lost several pints of blood before being ferreted off to an undisclosed location.  The incident was brushed under the rug until the Decker mauling brought several previous attacks to national attention, exposing a pattern of unprovoked attacks on random dweebs.

The reason Bush sounds as dumb as a hound.

A rift between Barney and Karl Rove became public shortly after Rove’s resignation, when Rove publicly lashed out at the terrier, calling him “a lump.” Back-channel reports said that was coded talk by Rove, that alluded to the fact that Barney used Rove’s White House office as his toilet of choice.

Perhaps the most controversial of Barney’s run-ins with politicos is his public spat with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who publicly ridiculed Barney as a “smaller breed,” unworthy of real world leaders.  Barney responded by challenging Putin’s “mutt” to a no-holes-barred dog fight.  Putin’s black bitch labrador, Koni, was said to have been amused by the challenge, but only said, “Драка с чем? Тот маленький приклад-smeller? Отсутствие fucking путя.”*

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*”Vight wit vhat? Dot little butt-smeller?  No voocking vhay.”

I was at the gym yesterday when I saw the live broadcast of John McSame’s press conference, during which he made his risible pronouncement that:

[I]n the 21st century, nations don’t invade other nations.

In my subsequent blog, I missed this angle mentioned by Greg Sargent over at TPM (so many hard bodies to ogle, so little time):

At a press conference just now, John McCain redoubled his efforts to thrust himself into a leadership role on the Russia-Georgia crisis front, announcing that two top campaign surrogates, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, are going on a visit to Georgia.

Hunter at Daily Kos picks up the ball and runs with it:

So if merely giving a speech in Germany is “presumptuous”, how freakin’ “presumptuous” is it for a candidate to send their own diplomatic team into a foreign conflict? Isn’t that, you know, a job for the President, not a candidate?

Why no outrage on this? I think it’s safe to say that if another candidate did this, conservatives would burst into flames from fury, and the talking heads would be beside themselves talking about how unprecedented it was for a candidate to inject themselves into an international crisis — politics should stop at the water’s edge, and all that. Instead, McCain is using a shooting war to buff his credentials? Seriously? And nobody in Washington sees a problem with that?

Indeed. Why is our corporatist media, who were all over Barack Obama for daring to even look presidential during his recent trip abroad, not covering this angle?

Perhaps because it would expose a fundamental flaw in their narrative of St. John, that lobbyist slaying maverick, and the role that lobbyists and registered foreign agents like Randy Scheunemann are playing in his campaign for the White House. On Tuesday, WAPO noted that:

Sen. John McCain’s top foreign policy adviser prepped his boss for an April 17 phone call with the president of Georgia and then helped the presumptive Repubican presidential nominee prepare a strong statement of support for the fledgling republic.

The day of the call, a lobbying firm partly owned by the adviser, Randy Scheunemann, signed a $200,000 contract to continue providing strategic advice to the Georgian government in Washington.

Randi Rhodes reports that he has received an additional $600,,000 more. Recall that Scheunemann was the President of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq and a board member of Project for the New American Century (PNAC), responsible for pushing the country into the ruinous ruinous Iraq war and occupation.

McSame’s media enabled hypocrisy is bad enough, but more important is how such relationships work out in the real world. Case in point: emptywheel over at Firedoglake wonders whether Georgia’s aggression in South Ossetia was arranged beforehand between the White House and the McCain Campaign, using Karl Rove as the go-between. Rove was in Yalta at a conference attended by Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili a few days after Secretary of State Condolezza Rice’s [Georgia] visit:

I mean, given that Rove was talking about the upcoming election as Saakashvili was walking in the room, it sure does make you wonder whether Rove said anything to Saakashvili about how a firmer hand in South Ossetia might help Georgia ensure its strong relationship with the US going forward…

I’ll say this: the Administration is even more desperate to push back against claims that they encouraged Georgia’s initial crackdown than you’d think they would be (compare, for example, their response to claims we gave Israel the go-ahead to invade Lebanon in 2006 or bomb Syria in 2007, and their response to claims that we encouraged Maliki to crack down on Basra). There’s something going on–and given Karl Rove’s presence close to the scene of the crime, I’ve got my suspicions.

“Scene of the crime” has an additional meaning— Rove was on the lam at the time, ducking a Congressional subpoena. But I digress. Hunter gets the last word:

Honestly. Take all the worst things about the Bush administration, double them, then add Joe Lieberman. A McCain administration would be the presidential equivalent of a slasher flick.

                 Urban renewal project in beautiful downtown Baghdad

Chris Matthews‘ substitute host, McCain enthusiast Mike Barnicle, reacted incredulously Wednesday to a comment by Iraq war vet Jon Soltz, co-founder and chairman of VoteVets.org, that the so-called “surge” has not been a success. Pressed by Barnicle, who refelcts the corporatist media’s official narrative of the surge, Soltz made a number of arguments:

America is less secure as a result of our invasion of Iraq, the surge being just the latest chapter in a failed war and occupation.

Al Qaeda, identified by many including the Obama campaign as America’s top national security threat, is more powerful than any time since 9/11, having reconstituted itself in the Afghan-Pakistan hinterlands. (Lest we forget, AQ didn’t even exist in Iraq before the invasion.)

The US military, tied up on two war fronts, is overstretched and at the breaking point.

The ostensible goal of the surge, Iraqi political reconciliation, is nowhere near a reality, especially in the Kurdish regions.

An overall oil law and revenue sharing law still hasn’t been passed, highlighted by the intensifying ethnic fighting over oil-rich Kirkuk.

Soltz concludes that the problem isn’t overall troop levels but “regional strategic diplomacy”, one of those nuanced Obama concepts that escapes our corporatist media’s obsession with dumbed down narratives for the infantilized American voter. (For which we can thank an educational system that substitutes  dubious testing paradigms for critical thinking skills.)

Additionally, there are a number of other arguments that Soltz didn’t (presumably have time to) make.

Iran has been dramatically strengthened rather than weakened as the region’s presumptive hegemon.

The Turkish military has intensified its incursions into Iraqi sovereign territory.

Regional elections have once again been delayed.

A national oil law has not been signed.

There’s the huge problem of what to do about the 4 million Iraqis that have been forced from their homes, including the vast majority of the educated classes vital to rebuilding the country.

The decision by the political and military wings of Baghdad’s Shia (Mahdi) militias to lay low. Surprising what a couple of hundred high explosive missiles and bombs can accomplish when targeted at your military and civilian base.

The ethnic cleansing of Baghdad, courtesy of US financed death squads, for which former Iraq Ambassador John Negroponte of El Salvadoran death squads fame probably deserves some credit. That and the installation of 12 ‘ concrete blast walls has turned the city into a fortified warren of sectarian enclaves.

The decision by the Sunnis, made many months before the surge was even announced, to vanquish foreign fighters from their midst, the so-called Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Comes a time when the “enemies of my enemies” strategy becomes more a liability than an asset. Especially when our mutual enemy offers to put you on the dole of the American taxpayer, a perverse permutation of what we call in my neck of the woods– protection money.

Analogy wise, I live in Los Angeles where we have as many heavily armed gang members as the US has troops in Iraq. [Read more →]

[UPDATE to Supremes Slap Jr. Over Habeus Violations]

Now we know where our Frat Brat in Chief got the inspiration for his assertion that the US Constitution gives him unlimited power to pursue his grandiose fantasy as the uber unitary executive.

Twenty three seconds into the video clip below, we learn that the secret is out:

“There’s a little known codicil in the…Constitution which gives the dean unlimited power to preserve order in time of…emergency.

If men would maintain their freedom, they must, after having chosen their charter of liberty, provide for its wise, intelligent, and fearless interpretation to the end that there may be prevented:

1. Usurpation of unwarranted power by either the executive or legislative branches… -The Urantia Book

Photo credit to newsgroups.derkeiler.com

How dare the highest court in the land hold our resident White House psychopath accountable for anything, let alone violating the US Constitution, which Bush is said to have called “just a goddamn piece of paper.”

Same goes for Dem senators like Carl Levin who supported The Military Commissions Act– Bush’s complicit enablers.

Glenzilla does the post-mortem here.

And the NY Times editorial board weighs in here.

History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misdeeds of mankind. — Edward Gibbon 1737 — 1794

IN THE LUSTY DAYS. . . when the surge of civilization pushed onward to broader horizons. . . and a mighty breed of man wrested new life from the wilderness. . .

But close on the pioneer trail came the renegade hoards, land sharks, highwaymen, cattle thieves, terrorizing settler and tribesman alike!

Ironically, the masked man, the “Lone Ranger”— was never actually alone. He was always accompanied by a “faithful Indian companion” called “Tonto,” variously translated as “wild one,” “stupid,” or “fool.” This faithful Potawatomi Indian apparently felt he owed his life to the Strange Ranger, and willingly forsook tribe and family for a life of crime in the name of illegal vigilante justice, riding around frontier towns on his pony “Scout,” and kicking ass with a guy in a mask and a skin tight powder-blue jumpsuit.

The Ranger wore the same outfit 24-7, made from a special fabric which shed trail dust like water off a duck’s back, a manly man who never looked twice at a frontier gal, and a frontier gal never looked twice at him; perhaps it was the fact he used perfect grammar and precise speech, completely devoid of slang and colloquial phrases, and rode a big white stallion named “Silver” that was at least as intelligent as he was.

And he thought nothing about exploiting an old prospector’s willingness to provide him with enough silver to make semi-precious ammunition for 78 weekly episodes, and he thundered across the West shooting the renegade vampire hoards with silver bullets, but never shooting to kill, but rather only to maim his opponents as painlessly as possible. Tonto managed to get by on the regular ammunition.

Surprisingly the “renegade hoards,” aka, Western terrorists, they rooted out with bullets were not brown, yellow, or black, but exclusively white males. They were usually found in highly organized sleeper cells, intent on corrupting the innocent, God-fearing frontier communities of the West. They had no trouble getting their hands on the weapons of mass destruction of the day— dynamite— and never hesitated to bust a cap on anyone who got in their way. And they almost always demonstrated a virulent hatred of the “red man.”

This invariably spelled trouble for Tonto, who was inexplicably sent into infested communities to “scout around” for corruption by the “Kemosabe,” (variously translated as, “Trusty Scout, “friend,” “white man,” “horse’s ass,” “he who knows nothing,” “clueless” and “soggy bush”). Naturally, like a red cape in front of a bull, the town terrorists immediately labeled him a “murderin’ Indian,” and a lynch mob formed, seemingly by instant-osmosis, turning once decent town’s folk into a murderous hoard bent on, well, illegal vigilante justice.

The original American traitors, citizens gone bad, were almost always known to local law enforcement, this being small town America after all, where everybody knows everything. These traitorous terrorists ruled by fear and intimidation, thus justifying the vigilantism meted out by the American Zorro and his Indian sidekick.

And this early televised portrait of the social and moral fabric of early America endures, as our American Cowboy in the White House metes out vigilante justice to the rest of the world as he sees fit. But the distinction between which variety of vigilantism we, as a nation represent, has become hopelessly blurred. Is it the clueless horse’s ass, Soggy Bush and his sidekick, or is it the renegade hoardes, meting out vigilante justice on the hapless frontier nations of the third world.

History will not be kind.

Thanks to Cartoonist: Mark Fiore